We all know, but probably don’t act on, the knowledge that each computer on stand-by, each mobile phone charger left on and each new gadget we buy adds to the carbon burden facing the planet. The climate warms with our careless use of ICT.
Apparently, global carbon emissions attributable to ICT have been estimated at 2 to 2.5 per cent of world totals - about the same as the airline industry - and as high as 5 to 6 per cent of developed nation totals, according to a latest McKinsey forecast. Their report also estimates that the ICT sector’s carbon footprint will triple during the period from 2002 to 2020. For office buildings, ICT typically accounts for more than 20 per cent of the energy used, and in some up to 70 per cent.
And there’s more interesting reading: energy costs could rise to more than 50 per cent of overall IT budgets within some firms. Google, for instance, already says that their annual energy costs exceed their server costs. Alright, I hear you say, Google is a huge firm, and Malta’s business sector comprises SMEs. We could say we are micro polluters in comparison.
From a pure economic perspective, not even the green argument, we should care! The one thing Copenhagen highlighted, wrangling apart, was the greater need for a carbon price to determine the economics of energy, and what the polluter should pay; relying solely on subsidies to encourage firms to take up greener technologies isn’t enough. We’ve had the carrots, now we have the stick – in our case, higher energy bills.
The problem with gloom - and doom-mongering though is that it sends out negative signals about green issues. Don’t we need messages that inspire, and actions we can easily embrace in our everyday use of IT? Green issues should be as iconic and loved as an iPod for instance, not require just sacrifices. One initiative aimed at inspiring us to be green is ‘Do the Green Thing’ (dothegreenthing.com). The site is a collection of inspirational ‘green’ stories – on brilliantly creative videos (therefore, one of favourite sites at the moment) - from a community drawn from around the world.
The site says that: “…people from 202 countries have tuned into Green Thing 4.1 million times on the web, telling 48,067 stories, and saving 12,480.93 tonnes of CO⊃;”. This boils down to a reduction of 0.000000462 per cent of the world’s annual man-made emissions, which ‘Do the Green Thing’ calls a “…small step for CO⊃; reduction [and] a big step for the Green Thing community worldwide”.
It’s about the little guy doing his bit. And certainly, there are some easy, green IT resolutions for the New Year we can try out to make our small contribution, such as:
• Unplug: it’s not in our nature to be unplugged. We’re part of an ‘always-on’ society.
• Hosts & Servers: find out a bit more about who’s hosting your company’s data and see if it’s one of the newer-build, environmentally-friendly data farms. In traditional data centres, every Watt used by the server is matched by another for cooling and power distribution.
• Waste & Scrapping: use WasteServ to dispose of your old IT hardware, or see if there are any local initiatives – local councils, schools, charities and so on – that can profitably use your old equipment.
I have no doubt that ‘Do the Green Thing’ would inspire kids to switch lights off more, but what about inspiring companies to be greener? Some would argue that small measures, such as those advocated by the site, combined with ‘greener’ goods - a mobile produced to more environmentally-friendly criteria, or a new laptop with greater longevity and processing power, for instance - aren’t going to make much difference to reducing global carbon emissions. Much latter day innovation in IT has been developed to enable us to have a more mobile lifestyle, and it’s that mobility (air travel, car…), not the tools or the production of the tools we use while being mobile that remains the worst offender in the pollution stakes.
Others say that only rising costs hitting the bottom line will force companies to have a greener outlook by default. According to its research in July last year, leading data networking vendor Brocade found that companies’ green IT strategies were inspired far more by the need to reduce operational costs and save money than from any desire to be green. With nearly 80 per cent of respondents saying that their companies spent up to a quarter of their total IT budgets on energy-related costs, compared to 44 per cent in the previous year, it is clear that those costs will dictate the day for green issues, not inspirational videos, however creative they may be. It seems that corporate social responsibility towards the environment is lower down the stakes than companies would like us to believe. Cash, not usually care, drives green issues to the fore. And that’s what Copenhagen was really all about.